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Martin Luther on disciplining children

While I don t hold that a parent should never discipline a child, I think to use corporal punishment as a general rule for all parents can have significant

Message 1 of 4
, Jul 1, 2002

"While I don't hold that a parent should never discipline a
child, I think to use corporal punishment as a general rule for all
parents can have significant harmful effects on a child."

Martin Luther says that the best thing you can do for the child, the
family, the church, and the world, is to discipline your children
with the rod of correction:

"But this at least all married people should know. They can do no
better work and do nothing mre valuable either for God, for
Christendom, for all the world, for themselves, and for their
children than to bring up their children well. In comparison with
this one work, that married people should bring up their children
properly, there is nothing at all in pilgrimages to Rome, Jerusalem,
or Compostella, nothing at all in building churches, endowing masses,
or whatever good works could be named. For bringing up their
children properly is their shortest road to heaven. In fact, heaven
itself could not be made nearer or achieved more easily than by doing
this work. It is also their appointed work. Where parents are not
conscientious about this, it is as if everything were the wrong way
around, like fire that will not burn or water that is not wet.

"By the same token, hell is no more easily earned than with respect
to one's own children. You could do no more disastrous work than to
spoil the children, let them curse and swear, let them learn profane
words and vulgar songs, and just let them do as they please. What is
more, some parents use enticements to be more alluring to meet the
dictates of the world of fashion, so that they may please only the
world, get ahead, and become rich, all the time giving more attention
to the care of the body than to the due care of the soul. There is
no greater tragedy in Christendom than spoiling children. If we want
to help Christendom, we most certainly have to start with the
children, as happened in earlier times.

"This third point seems to me to be the most important of all, as
well as being the most useful. For without a shadow of a doubt it is
not only a matter of marital obligation, but can completely eclipse
all other sins. False natural love blinds parents so that they have
more regard for the bodies of their children than they have for their
souls. It was because of this that the sage said, `He who spares the
rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline
him' [Proverbs 13:24]. Again, `Folly is bound up in the heart of a
child, but the rod of discipline drives it far from him' [Proverbs
22:15]. Or again, `If you beat him with the rod you will save his
life from hell' [Proverbs 23:14]. Therefore, it is of the greatest
importance to every married man to pay closer, more thorough, and
continuous attention to the health of his child's soul than to the
body which he has begotten, and to regard his child as nothing else
but the eternal treasure God has commanded him to protect, and so
prevent the world, the flesh, and the devil from stealing the child
way and bringing him to destruction. For at his death and on the day
of judgment he will be asked about his child and will have to give a
most solemn account. For what do you think is the cause of the
horrible wailing and howling of those who will cry, `O blessed are
the wombs which have not bore children, and the breasts which have
never suckled' [Luke 23:29]? There is not the slightest doubt that
it is because they have failed to restore their children to God, from
whom they received them to take care of them."

Hell vs. a red behind... no contest.

gmw.

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